Chapter Twenty #2
In the living room, I find what I’m looking for.
The last time I visited my brother in the hospital, he told me that he’d hacked into the security cameras at Bertram’s building.
The videos upload to a custom cloud he created, in thirty-second segments.
“It was just Ring cameras, if you can believe that,” he told me.
“You’d think these big, swanky places would have some top-of-the-line, closed-circuit surveillance, but this is usually what we’re dealing with. ”
I sit on the edge of a chair that’s covered with my brother’s things.
I don’t let myself look around, because it will make me too sad, like I’m sitting in the center of his heart.
He’s brilliant, and he should be out there somewhere, giving his own interviews like Bertram does, inventing world-changing technology, coding and programming for NASA.
But the fire killed us both. It took away whoever we might have been.
And rather than try to heal, my brother has spent all this time carrying and living in the pain, so that I could at least pretend to have a happy life.
Being an actress in a role that fools everyone else is something, isn’t it?
Being a good liar is better than facing the truth.
There’s the live feed of Bertram’s building.
I click through the folder of auto-saved clips from the feed, but there are hundreds of them, between the lobby and the elevators and the parking garage and the penthouse.
It would be so much easier if there were a camera inside Bertram’s apartment, because then I’d doubtless have hours of him toiling away doing whatever it is he does in there.
But I have to locate the last time he entered the building and prove that he never left.
It’s a task that could take hours—time I don’t have.
There is Bertram entering the parking garage with his driver after we parted ways. Progress! I save the file and continue, following him into the elevator and to his penthouse apartment. Now to prove that he hasn’t gone anywhere since this morning, when he came to get me.
My phone rings. An unknown number. Normally it’s the sort of thing I’d ignore, but today is different, and I know that whatever is on the other end of the line is important.
“Hello?” My calm voice doesn’t betray the anxiety I feel.
I’m still clicking through the clips. No sign of Bertram for hours after his return home.
He’s right—he really doesn’t go anywhere.
A delivery person leaves food at the front desk, and the doorman brings it upstairs at ten p.m. Once the elevator dings and the doorman has gone, Bertram answers in his bathrobe, takes the food inside, and closes the door. The only sign of life.
“Mommy?” Collette’s voice sounds small, the way it did when she was a little girl, nothing at all like the maturing eleven-year-old who forever tries to carry herself like she’s twenty.
“Collette?” I rasp.
I hear the faintest murmur of a voice somewhere in the background, and then she says, sounding scared, “Mommy, can you come pick me up?”
These aren’t her words. Collette is too much of a stoic to confess when she’s afraid. She bottles it up for days, sometimes months, until it manifests in a violent panic attack. But as she gets older, she’s gotten better at hiding them. I know, because she gets it from me.
Someone is listening to us and coaching her, using her as bait. Waylen? The police? Elodie?
I have to be very careful about how I respond.
I recall our conversation several weeks ago, when I was driving her to her aunt’s house.
I thought Bertram was following us and that our lives were in danger, but really it was Waylen trying to scare me into retirement.
Collette—smart girl that she is—was the one who suggested a code word. Nail polish.
The next set of videos shows no sign of Bertram leaving his apartment. I’m almost done with last night’s footage, making my way through to this morning. If I can prove he didn’t leave his building until I called him for help, I’ll know he wasn’t the one who killed Erin.
And my celebration will be incredibly short-lived, because that means Waylen is still in the running to be a suspect. He has been more and more desperate for me to quit spy work, and he has a motive.
I can’t communicate any of this to Collette. All I can say is, “I’m looking for that nail polish we lost. It’s important that I find it.”
Where are you? I want to say. Are you frightened? Are you hurt? Has Waylen locked you in a closet and forced you to call me?
He wouldn’t hurt Collette, surely. The past forty-eight hours have made me rethink everything about him. Insidious intention can be applied to so much of what I thought made him safe to be around.
“Um…” Collette’s voice trails off. She’s looking to whoever is with her for direction. Smart girl. She knows better than to give a poorly coded clue and put us both in jeopardy. After a beat, she says, “I think you gave it to Elodie. The red and blue nail polish.”
The line goes dead just as a male voice in the background was starting to murmur something to her. I couldn’t make out the word being spoken, but I already knew that the low timbre didn’t belong to Waylen.
Red and blue. She’s with the police.
I’m still furiously scanning the surveillance footage as I work it out. Finally, I reach this morning, wherein Bertram emerges from his apartment for the first time.
He was telling the truth. If the circumstances weren’t so dire, I’d be leaping for joy.
This means I can trust him. When someone was making a bloody mess in Erin Casimir’s apartment, he was miles away in his apartment.
I know Erin was alive at least twenty-four hours before the bloodbath because she’d texted me for a progress update.
I didn’t answer because I didn’t have an answer for her yet.
But someone did kill her, and now I’m being framed for it. And until I prove my innocence, the police won’t stop looking for me.
When I finally muster up the bravado to approach Bertram, it’s so that I can break the news that his sister is dead. Not only is she dead, but she hired me to prove that she was the true inventor of his lucrative app, and someone didn’t want me to find out the truth, so they silenced Erin—for good.
“Bertram,” I say, coming into the kitchen, “I—”
His phone rings. Both of us go silent, staring at the screen. An unknown number. He’s about to decline, when I say, “Wait! Answer it.” He looks at me quizzically, but he does as I ask.
“Hello?” He sounds cool and professional as ever, his accent rhythmic even in those two syllables.
“Bertram Casimir,” the voice says, matching his confidence. “Thank you for taking my call.”
“Waylen,” I whisper.
Bertram furrows his brow. “How did you get this number?”
“I have my ways,” Waylen says. “Especially when it comes to her.”
My blood runs cold, and even though I can’t predict what Waylen is about to say, something deep within me already knows and is dreading it.
“There are things you don’t know about my wife,” Waylen goes on. “I’m not sure what she’s told you, but I do know that it’s all lies. She’s not just a pretty face and a delicious hourglass figure. She’s dangerous.”
How have I never noticed how soft Bertram’s facial features are?
Standing over him now, in the dim light of my brother’s curtained kitchen, I see the gentle slope of his nose, the smooth corners of his eyes.
I bet the world only sees the chiseled jaw and the muscled forearms. He presents himself as strong, confident.
But in this moment, I see what I haven’t allowed myself to notice in our time together: a sensitive, empathetic layer just below the surface.
He looks at me now, as though Waylen’s words are breaking his heart. All this time I was thinking that he was a liar with an edge, like me, Bertram was thinking that we were the same for a completely different reason. He thought that I could be sweet, that I really wanted to help him.
How do I convince him that I was lying before, but I’m telling him the truth now?
“Hang up.” I mouth the words to him. But he doesn’t listen.
“I know it’s hard to believe. I fell for it, too,” Waylen is saying. “But I’ve slept beside that woman for more than a decade. I know her in a way that nobody else ever will. I know her more than she knows herself.”
I kneel before Bertram, my hands clasped in supplication. I am begging him to end the call, to trust me. But why should he?
“I know she’s with you,” Waylen goes on. Bertram hasn’t said a word. He doesn’t need to. “Did you know that she’s wanted for murder? The police can place her on the scene. She walked right out the front door with blood on her shoes. Look, she needs to turn herself in.”
My head perks up at that. If Collette was being coerced earlier, then Waylen is being coerced now.
Turn myself in to the police? He would never suggest something so—straightforward.
He knows I’m listening in, surely. He knows there’s nothing he could say that would make me approach the police to turn myself in.
Whatever he really wants me to do is going to be communicated in code.
Bertram still hasn’t said a word. He’s looking at me with that devastatingly scrutinizing gaze, and I can’t tell whether he believes a word that’s being said.
He’s been lied to by everyone he’s met in his adult life.
Success has brought him money and fame, but it hasn’t brought him a single soul he can trust.
Or maybe he’s thinking what I’m thinking, that anyone who’s married to me and knows me as well as Waylen already knows I won’t go to the police.
“She isn’t with me,” Bertram says, cool as a cucumber. “But maybe I can get a message to her, I’m not sure. What should I say?”
Waylen laughs—a dry cackle he reserves for when he puts on his phony charm during one of my book clubs with the ladies from the PTA.
“You tell her that she knows where to go,” Waylen says.
In a flash like a bolt of lightning, I remember the night Waylen and I first made love, when he told me that the safest place to weather a storm is in a building full of wires and pipes.
He wants me to meet him at the parking garage of the mall.
We first scoped out the area years ago, but at least once a year we go by and note that the archaic surveillance cameras have never been updated.
The lights still flicker; the security guards are still too understaffed to bother with it.
Mr. X has confirmed as much. He’s told me it’s a stupid place to ever go alone. But then, he’s never trusted Waylen.
Bertram doesn’t have to ask me if I know what place Waylen is referring to. He can see the color draining from my face as I try to work out what to do. Did Waylen go to the police? Will I be swarmed the second I enter the parking garage?
“Margaux, I love you. I just want you to be safe,” Waylen says. Then he hangs up.
It’s that word—safe—that lances through me. I play that one word over and over. Was he saying it with menace? In earnest? I hear it in a hundred different tones each time I try to remember, although it was only a few seconds ago.
Bertram takes me by my arms and gently pulls me to my feet. “What’s going on?” he asks me, with the precautionary tone one might use on a rabid dog.
“I’m not dangerous,” I tell him. “But I am a liar. Or—I can be. Sometimes. Not always.”
He puts a finger to my lips, halting me. “You said that you believe me,” he says. “I’d like to give you the same chance to tell me the truth.”