by Alexis Bass
I only know how to risk chaos instead of doing nothing. There’s something I could say now to the agents, a blatant lie, but one they’re sure to believe now that they see how I’ve been beaten and stashed, a lie that will unearth all the fears they should have about making a deal with a corrupt family like the Duvals. Sepp is coming toward me and my legs are too weak to move. I scream, “Run! It’s a trap!”
Hall and Ryan immediately reach back and pull out their weapons. Warren’s eyes are on them, and Edison takes the opportunity to knock Warren’s gun to the ground. Warren fumbles to retrieve it.
“You know the beautiful thing about Dr. Alice?” Oswald says. “Her victims never saw it coming.”
Karen comes up from behind Hall and rams a syringe into his neck. He falls to his knees, grabbing at the protruding object, his mouth open in a soundless scream. Ryan watches in terror and turns his gun on Karen.
I don’t know who takes the first shot, or the next, only that bullets are being fired. I fall against the bench seat, as I hear them clang off the sides of the boat and ricochet off the walls of the warehouse. Sepp rushes to the steering wheel and starts the engine. I try to find Edison as we back away from the dock, the boat’s engine grinding. But we are moving too fast and my head is thick with fog and my eyes are watering as my vision blurs, and I can’t make out what’s happening back at the dock. Our boat travels past the other docks, the engine growing louder with speed. Sepp groans at it and yells, “Come on, come on!”
I’m screaming, “What about Edison? We can’t leave him!” But I’m too far away from Sepp, and he can’t hear me over all the noise. Soon the engine is roaring, and we’re headed farther and farther from the shore until we can’t see it anymore.
Chapter 60
We’ve been driving for a while in the open water when the engine lets out a gurgle. We slow to a sputter before the boat jerks forward and stops. Sepp curses and hits the steering wheel; he pounds on the navigation panel.
I haven’t moved from the bench seat. I haven’t been able to. The cold wind helped with my nausea, but there is a pain in my chest that won’t let up. Every breath feels like it takes a great effort. Karen said I inhaled enough tamoxide to never wake up again and I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before the poison spreads. If I die out here, I won’t know if Edison got away or what happened to the agents. I won’t know if the risks I took were for nothing. I close my eyes for a moment and when I open them tears rush out.
“How could you leave Edison like that?” I scream, confident Sepp can hear me now that the boat is no longer running and I don’t have to compete with the noise of the engine. “You just left him!” Sepp doesn’t turn around. I hoist myself up and use the side of the boat to keep steady as I move toward the navigation panel. I feel weak, like I’m going to collapse any second, but I need answers from him. When I’m close enough, I tug on the back of Sepp’s shirt. “I tried to get you to stop. How could you leave him there with them? Do you know what they were going to do to him?” I cry.
“I know what they were going to do to you,” Sepp says, still facing forward, not turning to face me, even as I pull harder on his shirt. “The most important thing was getting you out of there; Edison would agree. He still had a chance, but he wouldn’t have been able to handle it if anything happened to you.”
“But—I heard them—your family was done trusting him. We have to go back for him.”
“We’re out of gas.” Sepp turns around slowly; it’s the first time he’s looked at me since we left the warehouse on the water. His face is stricken with grief. The front of his shirt is covered in blood.
“What happened—?”
He lets out a laugh as he looks down at his entire front, dark and sticky. He walks past me, a certain grace about him for someone with a bullet wound, and stumbles as he makes his way to the back of the boat where he slides into the bench seat. He shifts in the direction of the wind and closes his eyes against the breeze.
“We have to try to stop the bleeding.” I gather the blanket bunched next to a box of canned bait and drag it over to him. The wound is on his stomach. When I try to put pressure there, he coughs, he cries out, he jerks away. His mouth is bright red, blood starting to drip from the corners of his lips.
“You have to let me,” I say, being gentle this time as I find the place that’s letting out the most blood and apply pressure. The blanket soaks through in seconds. I notice his arms are limp by his sides.
I stand up and walk back to the steering enclosure, grabbing on to whatever I can to balance myself to keep from slipping back and forth with the rocking of the boat. I flip all the switches on the navigation panel. I pick up the radio. “Hello?” I scream into the microphone over and over again. There’s no answer. I can’t even hear static. I’m sobbing as I try the engine again and again. I search for Sepp’s phone and find it in his pocket. There’s no service. No matter where I am on the boat, the front, the back, the left side, the right side, I can’t get a signal.
“It’s no use,” he says. He motions for me to come over to him and I do it. I fall next to him on the bench seat. “I always thought I’d be in Brazil on the beach sipping a caipirinha when the FBI surrounded me. That’s the ending I was hoping for.” He takes one long ragged breath. His lips are a shade closer to blue.
“I thought it’d be exactly like this,” I say. We are both clammy, coated in droplets from the mist in the air. We both take big breaths and choke on the exhale. “I always knew it would happen too soon.”
“Maris,” he says. He smiles. “You’re not dying.”
“I inhaled tamoxide. Karen held it to my mouth until I was unconscious.” I’ve worked out what happened, how I was taken to the dock at the warehouse. The night Karen and Warren found me in Sepp’s room, she had Edison’s phone, but I hadn’t remembered that and assumed it was Edison when I got those texts at the Fourth of July party. It was a ploy to get rid of me because she thought I was with Sepp, before she realized the truth of what I knew, and it turned out to be the perfect trap. “I heard her say I wouldn’t be awake for long, if I woke up at all.”
“And yet here you are, wide awake.”
I shake my head. More tears spill down my cheeks. “Sepp—I’m not.” It’s all I can get out. There is a price for everything, and maybe this is the cost of living fast, taking risks, and playing the odds for love.
“Hey,” he says, leaning into me. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Don’t start lying to me now.” This makes him vibrate with silent laughter.
“Not a lie,” he says and I watch his face relax. “Bribing federal officers can only go one of two ways. When Edison and I met them at the office and made the deal, it seemed like we were really going to pull it off. But I knew what I was getting into.” A small smile forms on his lips, but his eyes turn glassy. “We’ve been ruining ourselves, all along. I don’t know how it was for them—my parents, my grandfather—if it got easier every time, and they stopped feeling guilty. It never got easier for me. I hated myself, knowing how we were setting up Kath.”
“The agents had already linked Ellis Exports to the Dr. Alice murders.”
“Ellis Exports had nothing to do with any of that. They were easy to frame once we got the shipping schedule from Kath, and could make sure that when Ellis’ East Port was searched, there would be incriminating evidence. They were the perfect target because of the shipping they did for Goodman Pharmaceuticals.”
“That’s why I spoke to the agents,” I admit. “I found out George was involved and I was scared. I couldn’t trust Edison to tell me if I had any real reason to be.”
“You definitely should have been afraid. My family is ruthless about keeping power.” His expression flattens and the sadness behind his eyes turns to anger.
I feel the same fury, thinking of my own father. “It’s George’s fault. He could’ve refused to do the delivery, he could’ve—”
“It’s not that simple,” Sepp says. �
��Who would turn down the promotion that a sizable order from Dr. Alice would earn them?”
Archaletta really had spelled it all out for me that day, that greed was at the root of every sinister thing that I would go on to discover; his parting message. All that money. Who could stay away? I couldn’t. I couldn’t.
“Who is Dr. Alice?”
Sepp smiles again. “He’s whoever we needed him to be. An alias that sends untraceable messages to desperate Goodman Pharmaceuticals reps about to be let go, and gives instructions for a hand delivery, with the promise of a bulk order, the kind that always resulted in a promotion due to some dated company policy. It’s genius, when you think about it, and I have to admire that, at the very least. It was our way of keeping our distance. Creating a trail that didn’t lead to us. If there was a trail at all.”
“But you were still the ones who used the tamoxide, who went through with the killings then made the bodies disappear at the quarry.”
His expression darkens. “That’s my biggest regret,” he says. “Edison. I was the one who saw him in the quarry, caught him watching us. I was only seventeen, but I knew what we did; I knew that if anyone found out, we’d lose everything. I was afraid. I was so relieved when Oswald wanted to bring Edison closer instead of getting rid of him. And I liked having a brother. It was lonely before he came around. But if I could go back, I would’ve pretended I hadn’t seen him. I would have, for once, kept my mouth shut.”
I see flashes of them together—their embrace on the roof of the Duval office building, the two of them warring as they balanced on paddleboards in the cove. “What about Edison’s mother? How could you do that to him?”
He closes his eyes for a moment; he doesn’t seem surprised that I know, or maybe he is too weak to show it. “She wanted a payoff, too. She was making threats, getting difficult. We didn’t tell Edison what she was asking of us. There was only one way we knew to end her, but we wanted her to die in the hospital, where he might be able to prepare or better accept it.”
“Sepp, come on.” I put my hand over his. His skin is cold. “She was killed like that because it would be harder to trace back to your family. Nothing suspicious about a hospital death unless you see the bloodwork on the original medical records.”
“Nothing ever gets past you.” He smiles weakly at me. “I like that about you.”
“She sent the medical records to Edison. But he didn’t understand what to look for like I did.”
He nods. “She was getting too suspicious of us. She knew whatever we had to hide was big, the way we treated Edison so well and inexplicably gave in to her demands. She wanted the world from us, but we couldn’t give her the world and keep it for ourselves also.”
He smiles at me again his lips are turning pale, and his mouth is red with blood. “We didn’t want him to know that she was blackmailing us. She was his mother, and he loved her. So I thought, better to let her die a saint.” He’s wheezing as he talks, his voice getting weaker. “I’d do anything for him, you know?”
More blood is gathering around his mouth. His head is damp with sweat. He shivers, and I pull up the blanket, tuck it around his shoulders.
“Maris,” he whispers. “I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me.”
I shake my head, trying to stop the tears from falling. “I can’t stay mad at you,” I tell him.
The realization settles in slowly, what’s happening to Sepp, and how quickly, and how he must feel it, too, if he’s trying to make amends.
“I told Edison to stay close to you,” he says, his voice getting lower.
“I understand.” I was a liability and Sepp didn’t want me to end up like Archaletta.
“Because he needed you—someone like you. Someone he could trust.”
I cry harder. “But I went behind his back and spoke to the agents.”
“For your family, I know. But also for him, right? When I heard you saved his life on the island, I wondered if you would save him in other ways, too. You didn’t disappoint.”
Since it’s impossible for me to speak through the tears and the sobs stuck in my throat, I can only shake my head. I was reckless, and now we don’t know what happened to Edison, or the Duvals, or Ryan or Hall. We might never know. I remember the very first thing I really noticed about Edison and let it fill me with hope: on the island, when he was bleeding and injured and trembling and terrified, he didn’t give up; even when he was scared he was going to die, he kept going.
“Maris,” Sepp says. He shivers as he struggles to lift his hand and clutch the front of my dress, so I’ll look right at him. “You took all the right risks.”
He trembles harder and I scoot closer to him. I fold my arms around him as best I can without hurting him, and rest my head next to his. I am glad to be with him now, if this is the end. I only wish he wasn’t fading faster than me, and I feel intensely how it really is impossible to let people go, even if they’re in your arms when they slip away.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he says.
I follow his gaze out at the night sky, the dark water, the stars all around us. A few tears fall from his wide, unblinking eyes. I lie back, wondering why I don’t feel weaker.
“Listen,” he says. “Can you hear it?”
I can only hear the sound of the waves, the water hitting the boat. And now his breathing, getting shallower.
His eyes are lit up as he stares out ahead. He laughs one more time, then coughs. And after that, he is completely silent.
Chapter 61
The sun is rising when the coast guard finds us. Edison is on the boat with them. His arm is in a sling. There’s a gash across his forehead, freshly stitched. Ryan is there, too.
Edison doesn’t believe them that Sepp is gone. He keeps trying to wake him up. He won’t listen to Ryan, or to me. The EMTs onboard check my vitals. I can’t stop shaking, no matter how many blankets they wrap me in. I tell them about the tamoxide. This makes their eyes get wide, and suddenly everything is urgent. They strap a mask over my nose and mouth and hook me up to an oxygen tank, as we speed back to shore. I can hear Edison crying next to me, but I don’t have enough energy to move, not even to open my eyes and tell him goodbye.
When we reach the hospital, I am almost completely numb. I can feel myself slipping away, slowly moving in and out of consciousness. My mind can’t land on a single memory for long, so I get flashes of them. A collection of moments that made up my life; too many to count, to keep track of. But I feel grateful for every single one of them. They fade from my mind all at once. Except for one lingering voice.
Maris, you’re not dying.
Except, I am, I think. This is why the fortune-teller wanted me to know about letting go. This is why she said I probably wouldn’t make it to my eighteenth birthday. It wasn’t all bullshit, she said. Every person we come into contact with plays a role in our future, if we let them—and I try to visualize the collection of people who made up my life, who got me here, like she said.
And yet here you are, wide awake.
My eyes pop open. My shoulders are being shaken by a man, saying, “She’s awake, she’s awake.” He introduces himself as Dr. Landon.
There is a lot wrong with me, he says. Dehydration and a head injury, but the tamoxide, well, good news, I have arrived in time for the antidote to work. He straps a mask over my mouth and the medication is administered in the form of a mist, inhaled into my lungs.
It wasn’t too late for me, he keeps saying. It wasn’t too late. I missed my own death, is all I can think. I wait to feel relief, but I just feel sad, and then so, so tired.
After it’s done, Edison finds me. Before we give our official statements to the federal agents and local police, Ryan comes to talk to us.
“The Duvals and Agent Hall didn’t make it,” Ryan says, new information to me, but something Edison already knows because he was there. Ryan’s hair is greasy, and his eyes are red and tired. There’s gauze visible under his collar, but he assures me that like E
dison, he wasn’t hit, only grazed. “We’re closing the investigation on Dr. Alice and making arrests. The Duvals are dead, the case is unfolding as we speak.”
“What about us—Edison and me?”
“You both were victims who didn’t know anything. You’ll both be declared innocent of all this.”
“And Sepp,” I say. “He didn’t know anything either.”
Ryan stares at me, considering this. I wonder if he can see in my eyes that there’s only one acceptable answer, if there’s a hint of determination left in them or if it’s only sadness, and he suspects that he should do whatever I ask, so I won’t open my mouth about the bribe they’d agreed to before I’d convinced him it was a trap and everything fell apart.
He nods. “Okay.”
“I’m sorry about Hall.”
Ryan stays stoic. “He knew what he’d signed up for,” he says. “It was always a risk. But this case is closed for good now. And Hall’s part in solving the investigation will not be forgotten.”
It’s later, after we’ve been interviewed by Ryan’s associates and the detectives, when I’m gathering my things at the hospital and Edison and I are finally alone, and he tells me he offered Ryan the money after all to keep our names out of the investigation, and that Ryan accepted it, that I actually believe Ryan will do whatever it takes to close this case for good and won’t let the investigation steer toward Edison and me.
After I’m discharged, we sit on the curb outside the hospital with nowhere to go. If George has been arrested and is in custody, as Ryan said he would be, and the Duvals are all dead, I wonder if there is anyone left who could be coming for us. It’s late in the afternoon, and the air is hot and still.
Nothing feels real, and I expect us to dissolve.
Edison leans forward. He cradles his head in his hands. “Why did I survive?”
And I know he’s not thinking of Ryan’s explanation of the events, that Edison being unarmed, and not fleeing the scene in a boat like Sepp, but flailing in the water, having tried to jump on the boat as it left the dock, he was not a target of the gunfire and was also very lucky. He’s thinking back to that day in the quarry when he was thirteen.