by Sophie Davis
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
One hour and seven minutes later, I was standing outside the penthouse suite at the W in downtown D.C.—sight fully functioning, though the restoration was fairly recent. The events of the last hour were much like Asher had predicted. Exactly five hours and thirty-two minutes after Asher called David to tell him we were on our way, Asher turned off his phone as David’s name appeared on his screen. Nine minutes later, one of the three cellphones registered to Phillip Kingsley received an incoming call from the Montauk Institute. Currently, Gabe believed both of my parents were inside the penthouse.
I raised my hand to the door, but before I scrounged up the courage to knock, it opened.
“If he says he has it handled, there is no reason to go up there,” Eleanor Kingsley insisted over her shoulder. Piercing blue eyes turned on me, when she added, “It seems we will be staying the night….”
Shock wasn’t possible to see on a face that had endured so many botox injections. However, eyes really are the window to the soul, so that was where I looked. That was where I saw the truth: she never expected to see her daughter again.
“Hello, mother,” I said softly.
Her face didn’t move, only a slight flick of her eyes that traveled from my head to my toes and back again. “Darling, whatever are you doing here?” she asked.
“Eleanor?” my father called from inside the suite.
“May I come in?” I asked my mother.
She hesitated before stepping aside and gesturing me into the hotel room. My father, Phillip Kingsley, stood in front of wall-to-ceiling windows with his signature scotch in one hand. He turned at the sound of my sandals slapping the marble floor. It took him a moment for recognition to set in, but when he finally understood he nodded. “Why am I not surprised? I knew I couldn’t trust that man.”
“Nice to see you too, daddy,” I said dryly.
“So the boy didn’t kidnap you after all,” he continued as my mother joined us.
With my father by the window and my mother blocking the entrance, both points of exit held obstacles and I felt a little trapped. You’re okay. You can do this.
My father gestured to the seating area as if to say, if we’re going to do this whole confrontation thing we could at least be civilized about it. Next he’s going to offer me a drink, I thought. Sure enough, as I eased into one of the chairs my father walked over to the bar and held up a glass, “Scotch?”
When I didn’t respond, he poured one anyway and handed me the glass. Watching the amber liquid swirl around the ice, I tried to come up with something to say. On the way over I’d given a lot of thought as to what I wanted to tell Eleanor and Phillip Kingsley, and I’d thought I knew. But being in the same room…I couldn’t remember any of it.
“Kingstown was never supposed to be what it became,” my father said, peering over the rim of his glass. He leaned back on the sofa cushions, where he sat beside my mother, and fold one of his long legs so that his ankle rested on the opposite knee. “When we planned the town, the idea was that it would be a socialist community. Yes, we needed people to work the mines, which is extremely hard labor, but we would provide those people with the best of everything—education, healthcare, technology, entertainment. Kingstown has it all, and is one-hundred percent self-contained.”
“So what went wrong in this utopian mecca?” I asked.
“Now, now, darling, nasty is not attractive on you,” my mother said as though already tired on the conversation but unable to help admonishing my rudeness.
“Diamonds are worth a lot of money—that is what went wrong,” my father continued talking as though his wife hadn’t spoken. “The area around the mine was nothing more than wilderness. We built the town up over eighteen months, all the while quietly hiring thousands of people who would live and work in Kingstown. A lot of the employees have…questionable pasts, and were in search of fresh starts. The opportunity to live and work in Kingstown appealed to them. Three weeks—three short weeks after we moved everyone in when the first theft occurred in the mind. Well,” he shrugged and chugged the rest of his drink, and then going to refill the glass as he continued, “It was three weeks until we caught someone stealing from the mines. See, in our utopia as you call it, only the citizens of Kingstown get to partake in the spoils. There were many who wanted to send money to loved ones, but—”
“—that wasn’t allowed,” I interrupted him. While he’d been talking, bits of long lost memories started surfacing. Apparently, Jonas’ murder wasn’t the only thing I’d repressed for childhood. “You tried suspending privileges as punishment, but it wasn’t enough of a deterrent—what’s a few skipped trips to the spa for someone who is used to weekly visits.”
“Precisely,” my father agreed, his tone deceptively light considering both his forehead and the skin around his eyes wrinkled. He must have realized I was drawing on actual memories, and not merely guessing.
“You can’t just fire people, either. What if they go blabbing about your bizarro town? So you came up with a more primitive form of justice.”
My father nodded.
“If you already know all of this, why are we rehashing the details?” my mother asked.
Both my father and I ignored her. I had a lot of mixed emotions where she was concerned, and a lot of things I wanted to say to her before I left that hotel room. This conversation was between my father and myself, though. We were Kingsleys by birth, Kingsley Diamonds was in our blood.
“For what is worth, I never planned to allow executions,” my father said, watching me carefully.
“I know,” I whispered. Just when I was starting to feel softer toward my father, another memory popped into my head. “But you did allow torture. You do allow torture.”
“Now you are just being dramatic, darling.” With a flick of her wrist in my direction, as if I was spouting pure nonsense, she rose and walked over to the bar for a glass of wine. Because clearly both she and my father were too weak to get through this exchange without liquid courage. “Having criminals subjected to mild humiliation is hardly torture,” she laughed and shook her head as she poured her Chianti.
“No, but public beatings are. Private interrogation sessions to root out traitors. Forcing one citizen to turn on another is. Starving people, leaving them to rot in windowless rooms, where the lights never go out and the ear-piercing alarms never stop. Locking them in dark rooms for so long that they start to hallucinate.” I saw all of these things happening in my mind, but couldn’t tell if I’d been physically present or I’d seen more video footage or….
“That man has messed her up more than she already was.” Eleanor Kingsley turned to her husband. “Your daughter is now truly crazy.” She sipped her wine and looked at my father expectantly, not a doubt in her eyes that at any second he would refute all I’d said and join her on the Lark-Is-Crazy train.
I watched him just as closely as she did. While he didn’t contradict me, he didn’t concede either, which gave me pause. The visions were vivid inside my mind, so vivid that I considered chugging the scotch to erase them. Still, I needed him to confirm my allegations. I needed him to admit the truth. I wanted to know I wasn’t crazy.
“For goodness sake, Phillip. Say something,” my mother insisted.
My father smiled thinly, his focus on me. “You loved hiding in my office, and you were so quiet. Even when I looked to make sure you weren’t in your usual spots, you still managed to fool me.” His expression morphed into a serious one, and a chill ran through me. Just then, he didn’t look like the man I knew. He was terrifying. I was terrified. “That explains how you know about at least some of the acts you named, but not how you know such detail. Who have you been speaking with?”
“You don’t get to ask questions,” I snapped, using irritation to mask the truth: I had no idea who I’d been speaking with.
This time my father’s smile was more genuine. “You know, it took me a very long time to tell you all apart, but over the year
s I started to notice the little differences. Which is how I know you are not my daughter. You have some of her qualities, some of her mannerisms, but you are not Lark.” As if the cold tone he used wasn’t bad enough, the abundance of confidence he exuded unnerved me further. For the first time since I entered the penthouse, I wondered who was playing whom.
“Do you think I have not been here before with one of you?” my father asked, his tone now so callous that any lingering reservations about turning him over to the feds disappeared.
“Obviously not in this suite,” he continued, after a brief pause for another sip of stupidly expensive alcohol. “But on the couch in my office, in my daughter’s bedroom, in a quaint little coffee shop in Greenwich Village, on a bench in central park.” It was as though naming the locations triggered a switch inside my brain. I could suddenly see my father at various ages sitting across from me. I could hear my voice as I lobbed similar accusations at the man who shared my DNA.
How many times have I followed my own clues? How many times have I learned the truth only to forget it again?
“It has been five years since the last time one of you waltzed in with your demands. At least, I assume you are here with more demands? You plan to go public with your knowledge, unless I atone for my sins.”
My mother was still standing at the bar with her glass of wine clutched between her hands when my father joined her and made his third drink in our short time together.
“Would you like me to tell you how this ends?” he asked, staring at me as he poured the scotch.
I’d come there hoping with the element of surprise on my side my parents would fill in the gaps in my memory, the puzzles pieces that made up the truth about Kingstown, with the real story. But my father caught me off guard. I wasn’t prepared for him to say this conversation was a rerun.
“You—all of you including Lark—will return to Montauk, where the people we pay a small fortune will remove all this unpleasantness from your memory. In a few short weeks, Lark will return to Manhattan the happy teenager she always is between these—” he waved his hand as though searching for the right word “—episodes. You, whatever your name is, will cease to exist.”
My father crossed back to the couch and sat. I looked between him and my scotch glass, and then set the drink on the table in front of me as I shook my head. “Not this time. Your daughter has been missing for over a year, she can’t mysteriously just reappear without explanation.”
“There are a number of ways my PR team can spin her absence. I am not concerned.”
And to think, I thought they loved me…at least, I thought he loved me.
I swallowed hard. “What if it’s too late? What if I’ve already gone to the feds? Handed over all the evidence I have on you and Kingsley Diamonds? What if they’re watching you right now? Listening to everything you say? No going back from that, dad.”
He didn’t even have the decency to look nervous. What had I expected? The man wasn’t decent. He didn’t love me and worse he didn’t think very much of my smarts. It was like he knew there was no possible way I would turn him in.
“Because as I have already stated, we have been in this situation before. It is not too late because it is never too late when one of you come to see me. Let me give you a piece of advice—”
“Never show all your cards at the start of a negotiation or else you will have nowhere to go?” I guessed.
He narrowed his gaze suspiciously, and for just a second he actually looked nervous.
“I didn’t come here to negotiate with you or make demands. You had your chance. All you had to do was follow the instructions in the letter, but you refused. Instead, you stuffed your only child into an institution to keep her quiet. And because that’s not bad enough, you wasted government resources and manpower by having the authorities look for her.”
“Oh, please. We had no choice. How were we to know the Stanleys would contact the authorities?” My mother asked, though it was clearly a rhetorical question. “Once the FBI became involved, we agreed the best way forward was to continue the story that Lark had disappeared.”
I nodded slowly. “I see. And telling the truth never crossed your mind?”
“What truth?” my father scoffed. “That our daughter is a deeply disturbed girl? No, of course we were not going to make that public knowledge.” He waved away the notion as if it were an annoying fly. “Do not be ridiculous. A stint in rehab is one thing, but multiple stays in a mental health facility? That will never do for the future head of my family company.”
I barely heard most of what he said after “deeply disturbed girl”. The characterization caused my temper to rise. “The only reason I am deeply disturbed is because you made me this way. Because you wanted to protect your secret shame. My psyche wouldn’t have needed to fracture if you’d dealt with the problem instead of trying to erase it. You cared more about Kingstown than about your only child.”
Phillip Kingsley simply stared at me as if to ask, “So, what’s your point?”
I stood and started pacing in front of the coffee table where he sat with my mother on the other side. There was still so much I wanted to say to them, but there were a few questions that took precedence. “Is Kingstown the only place of its kind?” I asked abruptly.
My father pretended as though he wasn’t surprised that I steered the conversation in this direction, but he lost a little of his smugness. “Does it matter?” he countered.
“To me it does,” I responded.
“Not that you will remember it in a few weeks, but I will humor you. Kingstown is currently the only operational town of its kind.”
“Operational?” I repeated, turning to face him. “So there are other towns, just not ones that are up and running?”
“Kingsley Diamonds owns mines all over the world. Shortly after we established Kingstown, the board of directors debated whether to invest in other defunct mines. Ultimately, we did, though none of the other mines had nearly as much untapped potential as Kingstown and therefore were not worth building a city around in the end.”
I met his gaze levelly. “How many others have you killed besides Jonas?”
“Phillip has not killed anyone,” my mother snapped.
“Fine. How many people has Lincoln Baxter executed?”
This time my father couldn’t hide his surprise. I watched his internal debate over whether it was worth lying. While he wasn’t a very good father, he was a great businessman, which was probably why he chose to deflect rather than answer.
“So many questions,” he mused.
“Do your visitors not normally ask questions?”
“Not many,” he conceded, draining the last of his current drink. Instead of going back to the bar for a fourth, he retrieved the one he’d poured for me from the coffee table. “Normally, you-you fragments think you have everything figured out, or you are too angry, too emotional to think bigger picture.”
No one would ever accuse you of being emotional, I thought. Wait, did he say fragments?
“Fragments?” I repeated weakly.
“You are not real,” my father spat. “You are merely a fragment of my daughter’s mind, a figment of her imagination.”
“That’s not true,” I snapped.
“But it is. That is why I did not even ask your name. It does not matter. You are a delusion. Everything you think you are, and everything you believe to be true is a lie.”
The pounding in my head started as visions popped into my mind. We have had this conversation before, I realized. Not that I thought he was lying when he said other alters had come to him before—like I was stuck in a time loop, destined to relive the same cycle of events over and over again, except I had the added disadvantage of aging—but I also didn’t trust anything he said.
“Your memories of a happy childhood home in middle America where nothing ever happens are a lie.” My father brought the scotch glass to his lips but didn’t drink. “Surprised? You should not be. All of y
ou are the same. You are not even unique.”
More images, more memories of previous encounters just like this one flooded my mind; Robin Sharp from a small North Carolina town not far from a private island where my family had a beach house; Hilary Podessa from Maine, whose father caught lobsters for a living; Marni Shaw from West Virginia, who loved four-wheeling when she wasn’t busy working the counter at her parents ice cream parlor. The list went on. And as I thought each girl’s name, her “memories” of summers spent on fishing boats and school dances in the gymnasium were just as real, just as vivid as my memories of black-tie charity galas and European spa vacays. How was that possible?
“I admit, I have gone to extremes where Lark is concerned.” He set the glass back on the table. “But not to hide anything. All I have ever wanted is to help my child, my little girl. Is that so wrong?”
His words barely registered over the throbbing inside my head. I squeezed my eyes shut against the pain, which only made the images more vivid.
“Darling, come sit back down,” my mother said.
I held up my hand in the direction of her voice. “I’m fine.”
“Nonsense. Besides, what does standing prove?”
She had a point, and I was extremely dizzy. Not that either of my parents tried to help, but I managed to get back to the chair on my own. My mother handed me the scotch. “Drink, darling. You will feel better.”
The smell turned my stomach, making me worry I might be sick. Put down the alcohol. You have to keep a clear head. Squeezing my eyes and pinching the bridge of my nose, I took several deep breaths and pushed both the voices and the images inside my head down.
“Really, it is the best money can buy,” my mother insisted. “You would not want to waste good scotch.”
I stared at her incredulously. “Since when do you care about wasting money? I have literally seen you throw away cash after using to wipe dirt off your shoe.”
My parents exchanged glances. “Phillip,” Mom snapped, sounding both annoyed and nervous.