Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
“Hello, Margaux,” Annie says, ignoring Bertram’s bewildered greeting.
“I’ve just seen the news this morning. It looks like you’re being charged with my murder.
Congratulations, that’s quite an accomplishment.
Bertram has been trying to catch me for years.
He even staged a fake engagement to try to trap me. ”
The blood all over her apartment. The real Erin’s face on Bertram’s phone—she is calling from the real Erin’s number. But how?
“What have you done with my sister?” Bertram demands, suddenly snapping out of his daze. “She has nothing to do with this.”
“Doesn’t she?” Erin—Annie—responds. “We’re all just sisters and brothers here, aren’t we?”
“Cut the bullshit,” he rasps. “You framed Margaux for your murder just to get at me? Why?”
“I didn’t frame anyone,” she says coolly. “How was I to know she was going to show up at my little hideaway this morning? Actually, she ruined my plans by intruding before I had a chance to clean the place up.” Everything was lies.
Mr. X won’t believe it when I tell him.
I open my mouth to speak, but Bertram stops me with a hand on my wrist and a shake of his head. It’s futile, he’s telling me. Whatever she says is going to be a trap. I nod because I know that he’s right, and I don’t try to stop him when he hangs up.
Annie is too good. She had me doubting my own marriage. She’s unlike any suspect I’ve ever faced because—well, I haven’t exactly faced her. She’s been pulling all of her strings from the shadows.
“We have to find a way to get in touch with my brother,” I say. “I can encrypt my phone to evade the police, and then he’ll know how to prove that Annie’s alive, no matter where she’s hiding.”
But Bertram’s mind is elsewhere. “Could she have spoofed my sister’s number, or does she have her? If she has her, we have to get to them before—”
“We will,” I say.
Before Bertram can reply, the phone rings again. “Don’t hang up,” Annie says, with playful glee. “There’s someone here who wants to speak with you.”
“Mom?” Collette’s voice is tight, the way it gets when she’s holding back tears.
“Collette.” I grab the phone. I want to scream. To run to her. To beg her to tell me where she is so that I can fix this. But I know that’s what Annie wants, and that it will only make things worse. So I keep my voice calm, even as every nerve in my body is on fire. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
“Mom, you have to come and meet us. Everything will be okay if you just come.” Again, her voice, but not her words.
I look at Bertram, his wide eyes mirroring my own terror.
Annie has his sister and she has my daughter.
Bertram kept his parents and sister at a distance—I realize now—to protect them from danger.
I stupidly slept under the same roof as my daughter.
Even more stupidly, I love her, a fact that I’ve never been able to conceal from anyone, much less my enemies.
If I really loved her, I should have forfeited her.
Never told Waylen I was pregnant, sealed her birth records in a closed adoption and never looked back.
But it wouldn’t have mattered. The past always comes back to find out. And the dangers of this world always know how to hunt us down.
“Where are you?” I ask Collette, still maintaining my calm voice, even as I feel my whole body go hot with fear, my pulse thudding in my temples. If a single hair on her head is harmed, Annie won’t need to frame me for her murder. I’ll gladly go to prison for the rest of my life for what I’ll do.
In response, a song comes blaring through the phone’s speaker, tinny and echoing, like someone is holding a device up against their phone.
I recognize it immediately. A song that tormented me throughout my childhood.
A song the other kids sang as I sprinted away from them, and wrote in Wite-Out on my locker, and scrawled on my notebooks.
That is, until I moved away to where no one knew what had happened to me.
…The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire
We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn
Burn, motherfucker, burn…
I know exactly where they are.
Bertram doesn’t protest when I commandeer the driver’s seat, and he doesn’t say a word when I stomp the gas pedal to the floor. He is a man who doesn’t fear speeding tickets. He has all the money in the world. But he only has one family. That much, we have in common.
I veer into the parking lot of the abandoned mall. The one that Waylen and I set up as our safe space. I’m positive that this is where Annie is.
Is she working with Waylen? Was all of this a conspiracy orchestrated by both of them? But why? Because he wants me to quit my vigilantism so much that he has to scare me out of it, and chasing me around in some blacked-out cars wasn’t enough?
But if Erin—Annie—isn’t dead, then whose blood was in the apartment?
And if she isn’t dead, that means Waylen didn’t kill her.
But—as the sick feeling in my gut suggests—he did bring her here.
He knows that most things don’t rattle me.
I’ve dealt with killers, fraudsters, con men, and loan sharks alike.
I’ve ventured into dark shadows and damp basements without so much as a hair standing up on the back of my neck.
But for the first time in years, I’m terrified of all the unanswered questions. And because I know better than anyone that things aren’t always what they seem.
sister, brother duo implicated in fire that kills parents
The parking garage is blocked off, so I abandon the car at the entrance and run inside, Bertram at my heels.
“Erin!” he’s shouting. I can hear by the way he says her name that he loves her.
It was ingenious of Annie to assume Erin’s identity when there’s virtually nothing about her online.
Bertram’s entire family keeps a low profile.
I suppose it’s the same principle that compels all major tech figures to keep their families offline.
They know better than anyone how their apps are used to spy on us.
Someone, somewhere has access to our most intimate thoughts, desires, and fears.
My brother taught me that people will tell their search history things that they wouldn’t even tell their spouse.
But I never search for anything for myself. I never type my thoughts out into the tempting clean white search bar. Not even in the middle of the night, when I’m the only one awake and my darkest thoughts tempt me to confide in someone.
“There are things you don’t know about my wife.” Waylen spoke the words, but even he doesn’t know how true they are.
My footsteps echo in the empty, cavernous space.
Gray concrete and shadows are all around me.
There are no cars. The only life this place has seen in years is from the rodents that hide away in the darkness.
My feet stomp in puddles of old grease and water that drip down from the rusty overhead pipes.
“Margaux, wait.” Bertram has kept pace, impressively. Now he grabs my arm and spins me around. “Where are we going?” He’s a bit out of breath. “This place is huge. They could be anywhere. How do you even know they’re here at all?”
“There are no security cameras in the parking garage,” I tell him. “But they’re turning the rest of the mall into storage units, so even though it’s not set up yet, there are cameras. They’re somewhere in here.”
As though on cue, the sound of footsteps emerges from the top of the platform, accompanied by desperately heavy breathing.
I expect to see Annie, coming to do God knows what.
I know that she’s the inevitable outcome of being here.
But it’s Waylen, rumpled and sweaty, with something trailing from one of his wrists. Duct tape.
If someone tried to bind him, he would know to let his captor think they have him, and then he would know how to slam his bound wrists over his knee to sever the tape.
I tried to teach Collette once. She giggled at six years old as I bound her wrists with her neon pink duct tape that she used to make no-sew purses.
I told her how she could use her own strength against her to escape if she ever needed to.
But Waylen overheard us and came running.
It turned into an hours-long fight about how I was going to scare her.
“She has to know what to do,” I’d said. “She needs to be prepared.”
“Prepared for what?” he’d cried. “Nothing bad is going to happen.”
As always, I was right. It’s a curse that has followed me all my life.
Even as a child, born into the nuclear American dream: two parents, two children, a pretty little house, and an old barn cat that found his way into our yard all the time for table scraps.
Even then, I carried an internalized sense of dread.
The sunsets were too pretty. My father’s jokes were too corny and they made us laugh too loud.
I knew, somehow, that it was too good to stay that way forever.
I thought that I could prepare Collette the way I wish someone had prepared me.
Now Waylen makes his way to me, and I see a bruise that’s forming on the side of his head. Someone hit him with a blunt object. Someone too small to overpower him themselves, so they knocked him unconscious and tied him up and put him out of the way. Someone slight and slender like Annie.
“Margaux, thank God,” he says. “You’re safe.”
He grabs my shoulders and then pulls me into an embrace, but I feel my body tense up. Earlier he was chasing me out of the house, shouting for me to come back. He was warning Bertram about me. He lured me here.
“You told Annie about our meeting spot,” I say, and I can feel that my accusatory tone stuns him. He draws back.
“Annie? That deranged woman who attacked me?”
Bertram seems to have the same thought I do, that Waylen and Annie are working together somehow, and that she’ll descend like a wraith from the rafters at any moment.
But no one comes.
“I was so worried about you,” Waylen says.
“First you ran out of the house and I had no idea where you were going or what was wrong. Then the police came looking for you. They think you killed Bertram’s sister.
They refused to tell me anything. They wanted to search the house, but I wouldn’t let them. ”
“You’re not working with the police?” I ask, my voice trailing uncertainly.
“Of course not.” His eyes meet mine, and I see the Waylen who made me fall in love with him. But this is the same Waylen who chased me in a decoy car to scare me out of my vigilante work.
I want to trust him. But I don’t know what to believe. I don’t even know if I can trust myself.
Bertram takes my arm. His grasp isn’t forceful, but it is firm. He’s telling me that he doesn’t trust Waylen, and that I should trust him instead.
“Where is Collette?” I ask.
“Don’t you have her?” Waylen says. The fear on his face tells me that he’s surprised by my question.
I think of the anger in Elodie’s voice on the phone when she realized I’d dragged her into more than she’d bargained for. She said the police were looking for me.
For a second, I allow myself to feel hope that Elodie is keeping Collette somewhere safe, somehow.
Elodie didn’t turn Collette back over to Waylen.
Maybe she’s still hidden somewhere. Or maybe, in desperation, Elodie gave her to the police, and that’s where Collette was when she called me.
It’s not ideal, but maybe she’s drinking hot cocoa in a police station somewhere, biding her time until I’m found to be innocent and this whole misunderstanding is cleared up.
Maybe it is as simple as Waylen bringing me here because he was worried about me.
Maybe Annie is just toying with Bertram, the way she has been doing for years. The blood in her apartment is fake. She spoofed Erin’s phone number. Maybe Skylar’s death really was just an accident. All of this was done to scare Bertram, and I was just an unfortunate pawn in her revenge scheme.
And then I hear my daughter scream.