Chapter 50
From the hotel bathroom, Lennon took an elevator back to Dante’s. She gave the house a quick pass—just to make sure it was empty, that he was still at Drayton—before locking herself in her bedroom. There, Lennon spread all of the papers from Carly’s file across the floor, arranging them chronologically. When she saw it all together, it painted the picture of a broken and violent man. The man that Claude had warned her about. A man she didn’t know.
Lennon thought back to Claude’s accusations in the wake of Benedict’s death, those drunken tirades she had been so quick to dismiss. As much as Lennon wanted to believe that the dark rumors weren’t true, that Dante wasn’t in fact the troubled boy turned violent man she feared him to be, there were certain things she could no longer deny. Namely, that Dante had been lying to her. He had been lying about his child. He had been lying about Eileen. He had probably been lying about what happened to August too. She couldn’t shake the image of him, with the open throat and the fear in his eyes. It was obvious that something unspeakable had happened to him. And while she had not ever asked about—or pried into—the particulars of his past, these files made it clear that that too had been kept from her.
What if he was keeping secrets about Benedict’s death too?
What if he’d been lying to her about his involvement?
Claude had been so convinced of Dante’s hand in Benedict’s death—a murderer, he’d called him. Even Alec had his sneering suspicions, which he’d expressed in fewer words when he’d visited weeks ago. Lennon had been so quick to dismiss it all, to cling to the lies she told herself just to keep believing that Dante was the person she needed him to be.
But as she sat on the bedroom floor, staring at the array of evidence, the truth she’d denied for so long took shape before her eyes. A portrait of a disturbed and dangerous man who’d left bodies in his wake. A man who had lied to her, a man who had killed before and likely would again.
She could see it now: Dante towering over Benedict’s desk, forcing him to take up the letter opener and cut his own wrists. His formidable will bearing down on Benedict with such a force that even a persuasionist of Benedict’s skill didn’t stand a chance. And if anyone had suspected his involvement, Eileen had both the means and incentive to clear his name. They had a child together, a relationship developed over years. Was that why Eileen had redacted the particulars of his file? Kept these secrets locked away in her office, so that no one could see them or speculate? Had she done the same when Dante had killed Benedict? Cleared his name and kept the faculty from investigating, even though it was obvious to everyone that something horrible had happened?
Lennon wasn’t sure about a motive, but it was obvious that there was bad blood between Benedict and Dante. And it was clear to Lennon that Dante had a penchant for discarding those who stood in his way. Claude had warned her of as much, and Lennon hadn’t listened because she’d wanted, so badly, to let herself love him. But now the truth seemed so clear to her that she couldn’t believe she’d ever been blind to it.
Still, there was one question Lennon couldn’t get past: If Dante knew that Benedict was dead, why would he have taken her to his house after he’d died? Why hadn’t he removed the body? Burned down the house? He was cunning, so surely he could’ve staged a more convincing murder. He could’ve made Benedict pen a suicide letter. Altered his behavior over a period of weeks, or even months, leading up to his demise. Benedict lived in a relatively rural area, so at the very least, Dante could’ve compelled him to leave his house and die in a place where his body wouldn’t have been discovered for some time. It just didn’t make sense. If Dante was the mastermind of Benedict’s death, why had it all been so sloppily executed?
There was, Lennon realized now, only one real way to answer that question. Something she’d been too afraid to test before. If Lennon opened a gate to the past, she could discover what really happened to Benedict the night he died, and she would know once and for all if Dante had been lying to her about this too.
So there, alone in her bedroom, Lennon raised a gate to the past. It was her first time doing it without Dante’s aid. Her skill and stamina had advanced considerably over weeks of practice, but it still took hours for her to call the elevator, its doors charring the wall as it appeared. Lennon, bleeding from the nose, stepped into the cabin. Its doors drew only partially shut behind her, an inch-wide slit between them.
The elevator cabin began to sink, down into the past. At first, it was a slow descent. Lennon saw a blur of light in the narrow slit between the doors, glimpses of sunlight and grass, the warped sound of distant voices speaking in reverse. But as the cabin picked up speed, the light between the doors intensified, grew so bright that it hurt to look at it. Lennon squeezed her eyes shut and saw nothing but the hot red of her inner eyelids. She felt stretched and pulled, the cabin screaming as it plunged through time itself.
And then, when Lennon was convinced she was about to die, the elevator slowed and came to a stop with the screech of metal on metal. The doors didn’t open, but through the crack between them, Lennon saw a sliver of Benedict’s foyer. She gritted her teeth, pried the doors apart, and slid sideways through the slit. The elevator disappeared as soon as she left the cabin, and she heard a voice she would’ve known anywhere. Benedict’s: “You’re just in time for tea.”