Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
I believe that Bertram is innocent. My instincts have never failed me in the past, and I’ve spent this entire case ignoring them.
No more of that. His innocence is the only thing that makes sense.
He didn’t kill Erin—he doesn’t even know she’s dead.
He didn’t steal her app. So, why did she frame him?
Is she just a jealous kid sister who wants her piece of the pie?
And because he’s innocent, he has no reason to hide from the police. It’s aiding and abetting to protect me. As the sirens wail, accompanied by the red and blue flashing lights around the edges of the curtains, I know that it’s over.
I’m already mapping it out in my head. He’ll go to the door, shove the bookshelf out of the way, and let them in. But moving the bookshelf will buy me some time to get downstairs and hide.
“Margaux.” He’s grasping my shoulders. How did we both get to the bottom of the stairs? I don’t remember moving. “Did you do it? Did you kill someone?”
The smoke alarm going off in the kitchen.
Waylen chasing after me as I frantically started the car.
“There are things you don’t know about my wife.
” The creak of Erin’s door. Elodie’s voice through the phone saying, “What have you done, Margaux?” And the pages of my journal falling around me like confetti—all my secrets and rage and sorrows like snow.
Did I do it?
Of course not.
Right?
But Bertram doesn’t wait for my answer. He’s shoving me toward the basement door, telling me to move. We scramble into the darkness as the police continue to pound on the door and announce themselves.
“Can we go out through the same window?” Bertram asks.
I shake my head. “We’re surrounded by now,” I say. “They think my brother is hiding me.”
“This is his house?” Bertram says, but now isn’t the time to answer questions.
It doesn’t matter. If we’re lucky, the police will figure out eventually that he’s got the world’s best alibi—being in the hospital, surrounded by security cameras and nurses, too weak to Spider-Man his way down the side of the building to come help me.
There’s no escape for me, either. All I can do is hide.
Bertram follows me behind a pile of boxes—just one pile among dozens.
A billionaire and a liar, hiding in a musty basement from the police.
I want to tell him that he can go. It’ll be better for him if he just comes out and tells them the truth: that I lied to get him here, that I called him for help and he thought he was doing the right thing.
But I don’t say anything, for the same reason I told Waylen I’d marry him: I don’t want to be alone. Despite years of convincing myself that I didn’t need anyone, I have never wanted to be alone.
The door breaks open upstairs. They must have used the pry bar, which means they really think I’m here, and they want to take me away. Is Waylen still tracking me somehow? Is he trying to set me up? Is Elodie?
I hear the footsteps thundering upstairs, then the abrupt stop. The police must be looking around in surprise, because from the outside this was a normal house, but inside it’s the most organized technological hoard you’ve ever seen in your life.
This was it, my brother told me. The last mission he ever wants me to do. Neither of us could have known it would end like this, but deep down we knew it had to end somehow.
The officer is calling for his colleagues to come in and take a look at what he’s stumbled upon.
Dozens of computers, hundreds of hard drives.
All of them are password protected, but it’s doubtful they’re interested in looking at what’s on them.
The sheer volume alone is what’s so fascinating.
My brother is an obsessive, fastidious record keeper.
He has footage from every security camera in every building I’ve ever occupied.
Except, of course, in the past twenty-four hours when I’d need them the most.
Did you do it?
I push the question from my mind. Of course not—right?
I also push away the image of my state defense attorney and my therapist testifying in my trial to determine whether I conspired to kill my parents.
And I fear that my brother was wrong. There is no redemption.
No amount of good deeds to cancel out the bad.
Bertram notices my ragged breathing before I do.
He puts an arm around me. I’m not sure why he comforts me instead of turning me in.
He should be running up the stairs, shouting, “She’s here!
” But instead, we both listen as the footsteps move through my brother’s things.
He tugs me farther into the shadows when the glow of the officer’s flashlight sweeps through the basement.
It feels like an eternity before they leave. It’s not illegal to have an ungodly amount of technology, and they have a murderer to catch.
“They’ll see your car,” I whisper.
“It’s parked down the street,” he reminds me. “And it’s not a real license plate.”
I look at the silhouette of his face in the darkness. “Annie,” he says. “She always seems to find me, and I never know when she’ll pop up. So, I arrange for rentals under fake names.”
“Maybe we can prove that she’s stalking you,” I say. “We’re sitting on years of surveillance footage. I bet there’s something.”
“She’s too smart for it,” he says. “And anyway, it’s not like what you see in the movies where someone slinks around in the darkness wearing a trench coat. She has other ways of keeping tabs. Just when I think I’ve adapted, she gets at me again.”
Upstairs, the voices and footsteps trail out the door. I hear someone give the all clear. I’m officially not here. Maybe Annie and I would be friends, we’re both so good at staying invisible.
Even so, we wait until we’re sure the area is clear before we slink out and make our way back to Bertram’s car.
He starts the ignition, but before I can ask him where we’re going, he turns to me. “Tell me this,” he says. He takes a deep breath. After all that’s just happened, this is the first time he’s seemed nervous. “You said you were hired to investigate me. Who hired you?”
I’ve never betrayed a source. Not even as years have gone on and some of those sources are long since dead.
But Bertram is right, I do owe him that much, after everything he’s just done for me. More than that, because he’s the only one offering to believe me. It’s obvious that Waylen has gone to the police and is trying to lure me into our spot at the abandoned mall under the guise of helping me.
And it’s obvious Bertram isn’t going to drive anywhere until I answer him. I’m once again reminded that he isn’t the one facing a murder charge. I am.
“Your sister,” I tell him. I think it’s time for a full recap.
Maybe he can make sense of it. “She contacted us—me—because she’s accusing you of stealing her app.
She hired me to expose you, so I’ve been pretending to write a story about your success to try to gain information.
I was able to track down the names of your exes, Annie and Skylar.
But Annie has been impossible to find. I thought she might have gone missing, but it’s as though she doesn’t even exist online.
And Skylar is dead. Erin insists that you’re to blame for all of it.
I thought that if I could prove you did it, I could put you in jail. But you didn’t do any of it, did you?”
Even as I tell the story to Bertram, the pieces fall apart. Pieces that I was so sure about days ago.
But Bertram seems to have retained only one key detail. “My…sister?”
“Yes. Erin,” I say gently. “But, Bertram—”
“She’s been living out in Seattle for years,” he says. “We haven’t spoken in months. Why would she want to take credit for my app? She’s never been remotely interested in software development.”
That may be true, at this point. It could have been pure greed that motivated her. But it doesn’t matter now. “It gets worse. Erin is the one they think I’ve killed.”
With frenzied speed, I tell him everything that happened since she hired me.
The strange behavior that night she answered the door, while Bertram was confirmed to be doing a live stream.
And the blood all over her apartment now.
The police chasing me away from the scene, clearly thinking I had something to do with it, because who would stumble upon a blood-filled apartment and not call for help?
So now Waylen either thinks I killed Erin, or he’s done it himself. I’m not sure which is worse.
Bertram’s eyes are glassy and far away as he considers this. He shakes his head. I watch as he pulls out his phone and dials his sister, listed in his contacts only as erin. I watch the color drain from his face as it rings and rings, and then goes to a generic robot-voiced mailbox.
“Where was she staying?” he demands of me now. “We have to go there.”
“It’s swarming with police,” I say.
He shakes his head. “This isn’t like her—we weren’t in touch often, but we got along. She wouldn’t do something like this.” Even before he’s gotten the words out, I know what he’s going to say. “Annie must have blackmailed her.”
My stomach feels queasy. I wish Mr. X were here. He would tell me if my instincts are off. My theories are going in so many different directions that I don’t even know if any of them are plausible.
Annie. Why do all roads always point to Annie, the one person in Bertram’s past who is impossible to find, save for one blurry paparazzi photo?
Bertram doesn’t wait for me to tell him where his sister has been living. After a brief search for something on his phone, he starts to drive at breakneck speed, his tires squealing.
“Where are you going?” I cry.
“You said her place is swarming with police and you’re wanted for her murder.” His jaw is clenched. “It wasn’t hard to do a basic internet search.”
“You can’t go there!” The desperation in my own voice terrifies me. I grab the wheel, but it’s locked in his iron grip.
“Then what’s your suggestion?” he fires back.
“You tell me that my sister is dead”—he blows through a stop sign, pressing hard on the gas—“and that you’re the last one to see her alive.
You tell me that you’ve been working for her to spy on me, and you blame all of it on your husband, while he blames all of it on you! Which is it?”
I have a flashback of my aunt and uncle—the only time I saw them after the fire—shouting, demanding to know what happened, demanding that I speak. I can see the raised palm of my aunt’s hand as she rears back to slap me.
Never again, I’d told myself after the trial. I’d grow up and go somewhere far away, where nobody knew what happened. I’d never be accused of doing something horrible again.
But here I am.
When Bertram finally comes to a stop—at a line of cars idling at a red light, I open the door and undo my seat belt.
“Where are you going?” he asks me. “The police are looking for you. If you stay with me, I can protect you.”
“No, you can’t,” I tell him. “They’ll find me.”
“Get back in the car,” he insists. I want to—how to tell him that? I trust him. So far, he’s only tried to keep me safe. It’s everyone else I don’t trust. It’s me. “I don’t want Annie to hurt you, too. Whatever is going on, I can get to the bottom of it. We’re trusting each other, remember?”
“I can’t go back there,” I tell him. Already the flashbacks are taking over and I can smell the smoke. It isn’t just Erin’s apartment, but the memories. I can never go back to that place again.
Bertram’s phone rings, and we both glance at the screen as it lights up.
Bertram’s shoulders ease, and he ignores the angry honking of the cars that now have to navigate around us with the light turning green.
He holds up the screen to show me the blond woman with a shy smile, holding up a handful of paintbrushes.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
“Erin,” he says, relief flooding his voice with that one word. “She’s calling me back.”
My blood runs cold. I’ve never seen that woman before in my life.
Numbly, I climb back into the car as Bertram answers the call.
Am I losing my mind? I remember Erin as a slight brunette with green eyes and fair skin. Nothing at all like the woman on the screen.
But then I hear the voice coming through the Bluetooth speaker in Bertram’s car, and that is the voice of the Erin Casimir I know.
She says, “Hello, Bertram.”
Once again, the blood drains from his face. His lips struggle with the word, but when he finally spits it out, some of the millions of pieces come snapping into place. “Annie.”