Chapter Seventeen #2
“It was always inevitable we’d have to stop somewhere,” my brother told me from his hospital bed.
We’ve been running from ourselves for most of our lives.
It’s this desperation that has made us so good at what we do.
I understand how well people are able to hide what they’re capable of, even from themselves.
I force them to confront it. I offer them a saving grace, or a just punishment.
I don’t think that I’m any better than they are, because I’ve been forced to do the same.
I hear the creak of Waylen’s chair against the hardwood floor upstairs. He’ll be preoccupied for a while. And since I don’t have my car, he knows I’ll be home. That alone seems to satisfy him—at least for now.
I take my laptop and my phone, and I slip into the basement.
It’s cold and damp. The walls are unfinished, fluffy pink insulation contained between wooden frames instead of plaster, and exposed pipes and beams where a ceiling should be.
Plastic bins of old books from Waylen’s college years, and old toys of Collette’s that we never got around to donating are stacked like giant bricks.
I can see the spines of Waylen’s old paperbacks through one of the bins. Murder mysteries, psychological thrillers, and textbooks about MLA and APA stylings. Before he became an editor, he considered being the next James Patterson.
If you want to know the truth about a family, go to their basement. It’s the one part of the house they don’t decorate to impress you.
The cell service isn’t great down here, but I know it’s the only place where my voice won’t carry throughout the surrounding rooms.
My brother answers on the first ring. “Is everything okay?” is how he greets me. He sounds so tired.
“I need advice,” I say. “I’m stuck on this case.”
“The billionaire? You’re a clever fox. You’ll get there.”
“My instincts are way off,” I tell him. “Everything points to him being clean.”
“Margaux, come on,” he says. I hear the distant beep of some machine, reminding me that he’s in a hospital.
Reminding me that my foundation is falling apart.
“Think. He’s got a sister whose entire life has been ruined by him.
Erin hired us because we’re the only ones who would work for free, but also, Bertram has bought out every legal avenue she could have pursued.
There isn’t a lawyer in the world who would touch him. ”
“Skylar is dead,” I say. “Bertram’s other ex.”
“What?” Mr. X’s voice is raspy. “When did that happen?”
“An ‘accidental drowning’ yesterday. No coverage in the news at all, just like when Annie went missing. Skylar had a family, people who loved her, but there’s nothing online, nothing in any news articles.
Her Instagram was deleted, and the most I could find are some vloggers asking what happened to it. ”
“It’s just like his parents,” Mr. X reminds me.
That’s right—there’s nothing available online about them either.
I’ve been so preoccupied by Bertram’s love life that I haven’t given much thought to his past. In most cases, I don’t need to go back any further than the date of the crime.
“You never did like to spend time analyzing the criminal’s history. ”
“Because it’s a waste of time,” I say. “It doesn’t matter if he wasn’t hugged enough as a child, or he tortured birds. My interest begins the day he stole that software from his sister. Or maybe even later than that, on the day Annie went missing.”
“Your interest begins there, but does the case begin there?” He pulls the phone away from his face, and I hear him coughing, muffled, as though into a pillow. I pretend I didn’t hear it, for my own well-being as much as for his.
“Where would I begin to look?” I ask.
He catches the desperation in my voice. “Margaux.” His tone changes. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Oh, nothing, brother dear. Just that I need to prove Bertram is the one who did the evil deeds.
Bertram was the one who killed Annie and then made up some ludicrous story about her stalking him.
Bertram is the one who found a way to kill Skylar—maybe not directly, but through his power and influence, using someone he could hire.
I have to prove that Bertram was the one who messed with the engine of my car.
Because if Bertram’s guilty…the man I married is innocent.
I have to prove that Bertram is guilty. The idea of Waylen being behind this case spinning out of my control is too crazy to say out loud, despite his renting a car to stalk me throughout the city to scare me off of it.
“Tell me,” Mr. X says. It’s a demand, but it’s given gently. He was always good at that. I found it so calming after our parents died. Someone was looking out for me. Someone kept me on the right track, made sure I did the right thing, even if everyone in the world thought the worst of us.
What I hate is how well it works. This is one of the reasons I rarely speak to him on the phone. He’s the only one who can coax my secrets out of me.
“Why did you hire Waylen? All those years ago?” I ask him, attempting to deflect. “I know you wanted a small-time criminal, but there were dozens to choose from. What was it about him?”
He plays along, knowing it’s the only way to get me to talk.
I was never good at getting right to the point.
“I liked that he was cool as a cucumber. I always thought that he could survive a proper CIA interrogation. He never betrayed anything he was thinking. Normally that’s a good thing in our line of work.
But a bad thing when we’re talking about the person who marries my sister. ”
“But you thought he was honest, right?” I say. “I mean, there was something you could trust.”
“I don’t trust anyone, Margaux. You know that. Neither do you.”
“But we’re broken,” I say. “That’s why we can’t trust.” That’s why I’m suspecting my own husband of something he could never do.
“Everyone is broken.” He’s losing patience, or maybe he’s just afraid he’s running out of time. “Tell me what this is about.”
“It’s—” I pause. Upstairs, I hear Waylen’s footsteps moving through the kitchen.
I hear the beeps as he pushes the buttons on the oven timer.
I move farther from the bottom of the staircase, lowering my voice to be sure he won’t hear me.
I’d told him that I was going to take a nap, so he thinks I’m in the bedroom.
“You don’t think that he would hurt anyone, do you? ”
“Tell me what happened.” My brother’s voice is deathly serious. “Did he do something to you? Are you hurt?”
I say the words quickly, because I want to be rid of them.
I say them like I’m throwing a hated object down a dark, endless well where I’ll never see them again.
I recount the strange events surrounding Bertram, and how many of them line up with times that I can’t confirm Waylen’s whereabouts.
I tell him that Waylen was tracking me with an AirTag—which could have been a misguided attempt at him trying to save our ailing marriage, or a hint at something insidious.
I confide that I don’t know if I can trust him, and that I don’t trust my own instincts.
That things since meeting Bertram Casimir have not added up.
“Margaux, listen to me,” he says. “I want you to take Collette and get out of that house. I’ve got your location on your phone, so keep it with you. I’ll get to you as soon as I can.”
“You’re in the hospital and you’re staying there,” I insist. “I don’t want to overreact. He’s never done anything to make me doubt him before. Maybe it is me—”
“Get out of that house,” he insists, and his tone makes the hairs on the back of my neck rise.
“I have ways of finding out where he’s been and whether it checks out.
I’ll contact you when I know. Until then, take Collette to my house.
He’ll never find you there. Don’t take your purse or anything he could have placed a tracker in.
Just your ID, a credit card, and your phone, do you understand me?
I’ll make sure he can’t trace your location. ”
“I—”
“Do you understand?” he repeats.
I stare at a spiderweb in the concrete corner, lit up by a scrap of sunlight coming in through the small window. A fly is trapped there, struggling fruitlessly. I feel similarly trapped.
A shrill alarm pierces the silence. One long, loud whining that breaks out into a vibrato.
I know that sound too well. The fire alarm in the kitchen.
The memories come back to me immediately, too visceral for me to stave off.
I’m only vaguely aware of Mr. X’s voice on the phone, still asking me to confirm that I’ve heard him, that I’ll do as he asks.
I don’t remember hanging up, but I must have, because in the next moment my phone is in my pocket, and I’m sprinting up the stairs.
The house is burning down. Everything is turning to ashes.
The smell is so thick that I’m already choking on it. I expect the doorknob to be hot as a coal when I touch it, but it’s still cool against my palm.
I see flames, thick gray smoke, and the charred skeletal beams of the house for a moment, before my eyes register what’s actually in front of me.
It’s golden sunlight—not smoke—that fills the kitchen, the first sunny day we’ve had after weeks of gloomy autumn skies.
Things are tidy, the way I left them. Waylen is standing by the stove, waving an oven mitt in front of the smoke detector.
“Sorry,” he says, when he hears me walking up behind him.
“I left the water boiling too long and scorched the pan.”
Whatever else he was going to say dissolves when he turns and sees the expression on my face. He must see that I’m not the woman he knows, but a scared little girl, screaming for my family as the flames come up around me.
I try to put on the mask I’ve been wearing since I was twelve, but for the first time, it won’t go up. My emotion is laid bare on my face, and I’m exposed.
“Margaux?” Waylen approaches me like I’m a frightened animal in headlights. “Sweetheart, what is it?”
I shake my head, take a step away before he can touch me. It’s nothing. Tell him it’s nothing. But the words won’t come out.
He takes my shoulders. My back is pinned to the wall. “You’re shaking,” he tells me.
“I—I thought the house was on fire,” I manage to croak out. “That’s all. I guess I haven’t been getting enough sleep.”
He wraps an arm around my shoulders, and just like with Bertram, I feel completely thrown off my game. My instincts are firing in a hundred different directions. Is Bertram a master liar? My mind tells me he’s not. But then again, I’m not even sure if I can trust the man I married.
He guides me gently into the living room, sits me on the couch, and places himself before me on the edge of the coffee table. His eyes are big and soft, so much like Collette’s in this moment.
“It’s okay,” he tells me. “You’re safe. You can trust me.”
These are the exact words the social worker told me. What a crock of shit that turned out to be. I was young and trusting and I didn’t realize that everything I said would become evidence in the trial.
Waylen doesn’t know about that. He knows my parents died in a fire, but not that my brother and I went on trial for starting it. And not about anything that came next.
“Where are your keys?” I say, unable to control the hysterical edge to my voice. “I need to get Collette from school—I—”
“It’s barely even noon,” Waylen says. When I try to stand, his gentle grasp turns firm, and I realize I can’t stand. He won’t let me.
The bruise on Erin’s face. Skylar’s body on the surface of the river. I was so busy tracking Bertram’s whereabouts that I never thought about the fact that I didn’t know where Waylen was when any of it happened.
Take Collette and get out of that house. Mr. X’s words fill my mind. He’s the only one who’s ever been able to tell me what to do, the only one who really knows me.
When I try to stand again, Waylen forces me down, and I kick him in the shin so hard that he staggers back into the coffee table with a loud thud.
I run for the foyer and he leaps over the couch, grasping the collar of my sweater for only a second before I wrest it away.
I hear his footsteps chasing me as I scramble into the kitchen.
His keys are where he always leaves them, in a bowl on the counter beside an old tube of ChapStick and some paper clips.
I struggle with the lock on the kitchen door, which leads out to the backyard. We haven’t opened it since the summer, when the weather was still warm enough to use the patio furniture. Now it all sits there, covered up in tarps like the old ghosts of the life I thought I was living.
“Margaux, please!” he calls after me, desperate. I trip on a rock in the yard but manage to save myself from toppling face-first into the mud.
I’m begging Waylen to stay away from me, not to touch me, and he’s saying that I’ve lost my mind and I’m scaring him.
But somehow, I make it to his car and lock the doors before he can get to the handles.
Now it’s his turn to try to cling to the car while I speed off, but he can’t do it.
He gets to the end of the driveway and staggers, and I leave him standing there as I gun it down the street.